Modern researchers know about the cuckoo’s cross-species brood parasitism – but one Roman emperor observed this more than 700 years ago.
Articles on Animal sex
Displaying all articles
Any notion of a dominant alpha chimp getting all the action is far from reality.
A new study modelled how a game of snog, marry, avoid, may play out in the animal kingdom.
Death by exhaustion, cannibalism, complete body fusion: across the animal kingdom, mating takes many strange forms.
Female moles evolved to have high testosterone levels, making them fiercer diggers and mothers. Female hyenas share this trait, but it means they must give birth through a male-like phallus.
Scientists don’t just want to unravel the mysteries of slug sex for voyeurism.
How do different species have sex? Medieval illuminated manuscripts contain some surprisingly varied depictions.
It’s long been known that it’s the male seahorse that gives birth to the young. But what role the father plays in the gestation is only now being revealed.
Most animals use touch, smell, hearing, taste and sight to identify and attract a mate (that goes for humans too). But some species have additional and unusual weapons in their sexual armoury – the ability…
The Conversation organised a public question-and-answer session on Reddit in which James Gilbert, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sussex, explained weird and stunning insect reproductive strategies…
Handcuffs, spikes and traps – you would think they were part of some bondage aficionado’s bedroom collection. But what are they doing in the insect world? A new study I worked on sheds light on why some…
It is fair to say we belong to a species obsessed by sex. We are among the only species to have sex for fun, not just for reproduction. For some other species, though, sex is far from fun. In fact, as…
A new species of sea slug has been found to inject its sexual partners with secretions that alter their behaviour. The sea…
Pachycephalosaurus is famous for its appearance in the movie Jurassic Park: The Lost World, where one is shown battering a man and his car. To achieve the feat the dinosaur used its greatly-thickened skull…
When it comes to sex among guppies, competition is high for those at the top of the game. To get around this predicament, a recent study has shown, guppies use trickery. Competition in fish of the Poeciliidae…
All organisms have been evolutionary programmed to spread their genes as far and wide as possible. One way to do that is to produce many offspring, and for that animals have developed some very strange…
If you had to guess what creature in the world had the largest testes, I doubt you would guess that the prize belonged to a cricket. The testes of the tuberous bush cricket (Platycleis affinis) are an…
Top contributors
-
Senior Lecturer in Zoology, University of Hull
-
PhD student, University of Wyoming
-
PhD student, Imperial College London
-
Professor of Medieval Studies, UCL
-
Senior Lecturer, Evolutionary Biology, University of Sydney
-
Associate Professor in Biology, Zoology and Animal Science, Western Sydney University
-
Associate Professor, Animal Anatomy and Physiology, Charles Sturt University
-
Principal Lecturer in Wildlife Conservation, Nottingham Trent University
-
Jenny Graves is a Friend of The Conversation.
Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Vice Chancellor's Fellow, La Trobe University
-
Associate Professor and Reader in Evolutionary Genetics, University of Nottingham
-
Research Associate in the Department of Biology, Utrecht University
-
Professor in the Department of Psychology, Durham University
-
Research Fellow, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University
-
PhD student, University of Oxford
-
Assistant Professor, English Literature, University of Guelph